brigitte downey

 

Chapter 1 - Paris is the Pits

Dublin 1985

I worked as a cashier for six months in Tipps Top values of Ireland Ltd. It’s RIPPS they should have called that dump with its worldwide reputation as Ireland’s Emporium of the Rejects - First for Everything in Seconds. Like nighties with necks so snug they’ll garrot you in your sleep if you so much as twitch. Or men’s trousers with the crotch two inches from the pockets which must be a blessed relief for men with their privates perched on their upper pelvis.

Not even in my most florid nightmares did I think I’d end up in a kip like Tipps when I left the grassy outpost of home in Dun-mo-Croi (population aiming for the 2,000 mark) and off to Dublin to blind them on stage and screen with my acting genius. The minute I arrived I alerted all the theatres and RTE TV that Nellie Flanagan was gracing the metropolis with her presence and was available for suitable leading parts. They said feel free to send in my glossy, my cuttings and an SASE which I thought was something fancy but only turned out to be a Self Addressed Stamped Envelope.

Cuttings? That was a good one. At 17 they expect me to have a suitcase of cuttings like some teen star. My solitary cutting was from The Kerry Monocle. It went: ‘The Dun-mo-Croi Players did a solid job of ploughing through a ho-hum production of ‘You, Me and the Others’. Nicolas Feeney showed definite merit in providing unexpected comedy in a dreary play. (This was when Fr. Feeney dropped the iron on his toes and howled the house down.) And Nellie Flanagan who tended to overwhelm her small part, nonetheless gave us her rendition of Atlas as she propped up the back wall of the set during the final act, thus obviating the total collapse of both play and stage.’

OK! So I saved all on stage from being brained by a collapsing set. That wasn’t the point. I had a supporting role in that play and that donkey reviewer Donnelly has the audacity to classify me as some kind of prop holder. It’s not the kind of review that is going to startle the makers and shakers in theatre land to come screeching over with sirens blaring to haul me away from the cash register in Tipps. I hate critics and when I become a household name I am going to blow the whistle on that lot.

When I hopped on the train to Dublin gasping for my first taste of freedom, I knew it wouldn’t be plain sailing before I became Ireland’s answer to Meryl Streep. I was prepared to suffer like all the greats had done before they hit the big time. I was ready to sleep on floors so I could share flats with exciting people my age who lived for the theatre, film and TV. Who did I end up with? Mad Auntie Betty who squeezes more praying into a single day than the Pope and the College of Cardinals combined. It wasn’t easy living with Auntie Betty no matter how much my Mam went on about how ‘very kind’ it was of her to put me up for free when any other girl from the country would have to pay through the nose to live in digs in Dublin. But I paid and how!

Instead of falling into bed at dawn after all night parties, Auntie Betty is dragging me out of bed and off to first Mass. Even in Holy Dublin this is neither the time nor the place you’ll meet exciting theatre people who’ll give you a part. This is where you’ll find the lunatic twins who spend hours taking turns kissing the feet off all the statues in the Church. One of these days those saints will just topple over and kill them since those statues have hardly anything left to stand on from all the kissing. But daily Mass at dawn is only a tiny taster to Auntie Betty. Before breakfast we have to thank the Lord effusively and at length for the bounty we are about to receive. By the time the prayers are over, the eggs are stone cold and the tea is stronger than Guinness. During breakfast Auntie Betty tells me all about the suffering children in Africa, India and Latin America and reminds me how lucky I am to be eating Irish eggs instead of infected grass.

Then it’s into work with Valerie Vaughan who waits for me at the bus stop every single morning. Valerie thinks that knitting is on a par with walking on water for excitement, and believes that Superman is going to fly into Tipps and whisk her away from her cash register to Happy Bunny Land. I don’t blame her. Anything would be better than working in Tipps. The only way I can get through the day with my sanity intact is to rehearse my favourite Shakespeare speeches out loud and beam myself away from dreadful reality to a more sublime zone. No matter how busy I am at that cash register I can declaim ‘To Be or not To Be’ without losing a beat and put more feeling into it than any actor living or dead. Because I have suffered so many slings and arrows just by living in this Emerald nightmare isle of 24-hour prayers and kips like Tipps. Plus I’ve got an extra edge being a woman. From what I’ve witnessed, it’s the women who get slung at more often.

Most times I never get to finish my soliloquies. Some cretin of a woman with more children hanging off her than jewellery off an Indian Princess wants to know where she can find a size 7 for Gary who’s chewing his way through his buggy. I feel like telling

her to go home, get in a large supply of Mr. Hefty, the heavy duty garbage bags, and wrap Gary the Gobbler in them until such time as he can distinguish between food and his buggy. That way she’d save money and I wouldn’t have to interrupt a divine Juliet speech and show her where the number 7’s are - right in front of her eyeballs of course.

Some days I feel like hanging a sign around my neck - ‘Don’t ask me. I don’t know.’ This would be appreciated in the US where things are more advanced I’m told, and where they’d realize it would be far, far better for me to hone my art and get prepared for Broadway instead of acting like some signpost illuminating the way to the booties, the bonnets, and the bras.

During the afternoon we get a fifteen-minute break. I race to the phone to call every place in Dublin where they might give me an acting job. Even the phone is against me. It’s either broken, engaged, temporarily out of sorts, or it swallows my precious money. On those rare days when I get through to somebody in drama, they ask me how old and how tall I am. When I say I’m almost 18, five feet eleven inches, green eyes and luscious brown hair, there’s a long pause before they say ‘Thank you, dear,’ like I’m some kind of seconds myself, as if it’s my fault I’m as tall as I am. After six months they had me convinced. Pigs would be dancing minuets around the moon before they’d give Nellie Flanagan a break.

By the time I’m through phoning I’m so depressed I know I’ll be flat out dead before I ever get to play Juliet. But then it gets to five and Tipps is swarming with the lucky girls who come dashing in for their cheap tights so they can get all fussed up for an evening out on the town. In the rush I forget about dying from depression and shooting and maiming all those low lives who keep rejecting me by saying that horrible phrase – ‘we’ll keep you in mind’ - when what they really mean is ‘Take a hike, freak!’

Then I’m really busy clicking away on the cash register. That clickety click CLACK (that’s me stapling the bill to the plastic bag) becomes second nature and takes my mind off everything. It whisks me away to another zone and I’m a great actress being pelted with bouquets on Broadway and the West End. I’m so mesmerized by the clickety click CLACK it’s a joy to be spouting my Shakespeare speeches out loud.

Finally it’s quitting time and the end of a nightmare day at Tipps. The lights of Dublin are all shining red and the Guinness signs are glowing in front of cosy pubs. Even the rain has a thrill to it that you’d never get in our village of Dun-Mo-Croi. And I have a choice. I can either hide out in the toilet to escape getting on the bus with Valerie Vaughan the knitting maniac or risk getting locked in for the night.

Most evenings I walk around Dublin in the rain trying to think of excuses why I shouldn’t go home to Auntie Betty for supper and endless prayers. ‘I promised your Mother I’d look after you and I want you home immediately after work.’ But I want to be like the students who are always living it up in the pubs near the Green. When the despair overwhelms me, I go in there just to feel the young excitement. I buy a small gin & tonic and it’s an awful price to pay especially when all my money is going into the bank so I can go to Drama School one day. But in the student pubs, the boys and girls my age all stick to their own little groups, and never talk to outsiders like me.

One evening, however, I did meet two drama students from Trinity College which is where I’d be going if there were any money in our family. The students were friendly as could be until I mentioned that I came from a village in Kerry where my Dad had a grocery shop and that I was working as a cashier in Tipps. They edged away from me with false smiles before I could tell them I was a genius actress waiting to be discovered. Another evening I met a nice medical student who was from the country like me. He chatted about autopsies and having to cut into a dead person’s eyes. He was in the middle of a great grisly story about a head that went missing in the hospital when his girl friend waltzed in. There were javelins shooting out her eyeballs when she saw the two of us laughing. That was that. They left me gazing down at my expensive gin & tonic and wondering what happened to the missing head.

Instead of going to parties, discos, films and plays I linger like an old lady over a G & T radiating nonthreatening smiles all around. I’m a brilliant actress so I can hide the heart crying inside me with loneliness and manage to look as if I’ve just won the lottery. But with the exception of the barman nobody says anything to me. I cut my losses, buy strong mints to cover the smell of gin and drag myself home for supper. Auntie Betty says Grace Before, Grace in Between and Grace After. I have to listen to Tales of Starvation and Horror worldwide while we do the dishes. This merriment is followed by a few rosaries on our knees. After that I no longer care if I live to see 18. l hunch in front of the TV and watch all those people acting. Zillions of actresses - younger than me, older than me, prettier than me, uglier, more exotic, less gifted than me, but none taller than me. So when they’re casting around for ‘The Return of the Giants’ I may get my break.

 

Before we go to bed I have to traipse all over the house with Auntie Betty while she goes from room to room drenching everything with Holy Water to ward off burglars and rapists. She always warns me not to forget to say my Act of Contrition … in case I make medical history and die of a heart attack at 17. Before I fall asleep I always beg the Good Lord to please get me into acting soon before I die of depression in Dublin where all my dreams were supposed to come true. My prayers were heard. I didn’t die from depression. They fired me from Tipps.

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